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Economist Glenn Loury to deliver 2007 Tanner Lectures

Glenn Loury, the Merton P. Stultz Professor of the Social Sciences at Brown University, will deliver the 2006-07 Tanner Lectures on Human Values at Stanford. "Racial Stigma, Mass Incarceration and American Values" is the title of this year's program, which runs April 4-6. All events are free and open to the public.

Loury's first lecture, "Ghettos, Prisons and Racial Backlash," is scheduled from 5:30 to 7 p.m. Wednesday at the Stanford Humanities Center and will focus on the historical, political and sociological role race has played in the post-1970 transformation of America's punishment policies. Loury will argue that "backlash" against the "disorder" of the 1960s has become "raced." A discussion of the lecture is scheduled from 10 a.m. to noon Thursday in the SIEPR A conference room of the Landau Economics Building. Lawrence Bobo, the Martin Luther King Jr. Centennial Professor and director of the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity, and Pamela Karlan, associate dean for research and academics at the Law School and the Kenneth and Harle Montgomery Professor of Public Law, will be the discussants.

Loury's second lecture is scheduled from 5:30 to 7 p.m. Thursday at the Humanities Center. Titled "Social Identity and the Ethics of Punishment," it will focus on the ethics of punishment in a "divided society"—elaborating a social scientific and an ethical critique of the "politics of personal responsibility" that emerged out of the culture wars of the 1980s. A discussion of the lecture is scheduled from 10 a.m. to noon Friday in SIEPR A of the Landau Economics Building. It will be led by Tommie Shelby, the John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Social Sciences and of African and African American Studies at Harvard, and Loïc Wacquant, a sociology professor and research associate at the Institute for Legal Research at Boalt Hall School of Law at the University of California-Berkeley.

The Tanner Lectures at Stanford are presented by the university's Program in Ethics in Society.

The Tanner Lectures

The Tanner Lectures are held annually at Stanford, Harvard, Yale and Princeton; the universities of California, Michigan and Utah; and, in England, at Cambridge and Oxford universities. Established in 1978 by Obert Clark Tanner, an industrialist, legal scholar and philosopher, the lectures are meant to advance and reflect upon the scholarly and scientific learning relating to human values. Previous Tanner lecturers at Stanford have included David Brion Davis of Yale; Avishai Margalit of Hebrew University; Harry Frankfurt, Princeton professor emeritus; and Mary Robinson, former president of Ireland and United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights.